This “Tribute to Paula Rego” series was born out of long-standing frustration:
I never understood why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked phone.
All the images in this series are made from authentic bad photos. It is important to take bad photos.
It’s the bad guys that have to do with what I’ve never done before. Authenticity is priceless; originality is non-existent.
And since each of these images is a secret about a secret, the more they tell you, the less you know. Me included. When people look at these pictures, I want them to feel what they are doing when they want to read a verse from a poem twice. Their real subject is myself facing the world.
Humor and laughter – not necessarily derogatory mockery – are my favorite tools. It can come from my general philosophy never to take the world too seriously – for fear of dying of boredom. Because for me, participating in the decadence of today’s man is an entertaining task and the only one that interests me.
To those who know her work and wonder why I dedicated this series to Paula Rego and not to Max Ernst or Hannah Höch, or even to George Morrow, I can tell them in return: why a tree cannot be named Pluplush?
NB:Quite a few years ago, I made a photo book called “A long, inconsistent session. Volume III ”, with the subtitle“ Attention. Photographer in psychoanalysis ”. It should have been the first volume in a trilogy but, at the last minute, I decided that I was going to start it directly with the third. Then one day, I met the psychiatrist who has his office next door. Since I had the book with me, I asked him if he could draw a professional conclusion from looking at the photos. He leafed through it carefully and said, “Look, it’s better not to know! ”
Dan Hayon
